TUMO students learn from top professionals. Many of our team members are award-winning artists, shaping culture both within TUMO and far beyond. Several of them are also TUMO alumni and practicing artists. That was on full display this spring when six of them presented their work in 100+10: Armenian Allegories festival, curated by Vigen Galstyan at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater and a prelude to the 7th Berliner Herbstsalon, RE-IMAGINE!.
The lineup included TUMO alumni Mariam Shahinyan, who coordinates alumni engagement at TUMO and keeps one foot in the photography world; Khoren, an illustrator from the Content Development and Production Department, whose creative work hits hard; and Mariam Energetic, a former TUMOian now shaping the next generation as a Learning Coach. TUMO Academy’s Drawing Training Lead Sona joined with work as grounded as it is experimental, alongside celebrated writer and our writing workshop leader, Aram Pachyan. Rounding out the crew was Artur, a filmmaker who recently jumped into TUMO’s Events team with that same eye for story and scene. Their participation reflects the creative depth embedded across every part of TUMO.
The exhibition wasn’t about heritage for heritage’s sake. It was about rupture. Resistance. Reinvention. And the ways local artists, particularly those coming up in post-revolution, post-war, and very-much-still-happening times, are using art to hold complexity. “We weren’t trying to stage ‘Armenianness,’” said curator Vigen Galstyan. “This was about resisting erasure, about bridging memory and imagination. Each artist was illuminating a question.”
We asked each artist five questions. Their answers range from deep reflections on memory to critiques of language, nationalism, and the limits of representation.
We begin with Mariam Shahinyan, who treats light not as a tool, but as a witness.
Mariam Shahinyan
TUMO Alum, Photographer
TUMO Learning Labs Alumni Engagement Coordinator
Works exhibited:
Two photographs from the series Private Closet, 2024
Cyanotype on paper
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
Mariam’s Personal Collection
“I was thinking about memory—how it fades, how it stays. The light is what breathes life into the image. It’s not decorative. It’s alive. It decides what stays and what disappears.”
Mariam works with light like it’s a collaborator, not a technique. There’s a gentleness in her photos that’s harder than it looks. It’s the softness of persistence. Of choosing to remember without mythologizing. She prints using cyanotype, a dreamy old-school method that uses sunlight and iron salts to create that signature blue. It makes the images feel like they’ve always been there, waiting to be found.
“Art can help us overcome grief,” said Vigen. “It can translate what’s beyond language, and in doing so, reconnect the past and future.”
And if that sounds poetic, it is. But it’s also formal rigor, compositional control, and an intuitive sense of timing sharpened through years of making things that speak without sound.
Glitch the center: Khoren Matevosyan is up next, and his work asks—what happens when no one is the main character?
Khoren Matevosyan
TUMO Alum, Illustrator
TUMO Educational Content Development and Production Illustrator
Work exhibited:
The House of the Old Architect, 2024
Mechanic knit tapestry
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
“I remove the protagonist on purpose. I wanted to build a composition with no center. where every element mattered. That led me to explore fragmentation, decentralization, and the idea of emptiness as an active presence.”
Khoren’s work thinks in spatial logic. Negative space becomes plot. A missing figure becomes the theme. There’s an architectural precision to how he builds a visual field, and a kind of quiet rebellion in refusing to anchor it around a hero.
Explaining a concept to teens made him realize how much of his own thinking was built on habits. Now? He’s sketching from new angles.
Next up: Sona Abgaryan, who draws like someone who remembers their dreams too clearly.
Sona Abgaryan
Visual Artist, Graphic Novelist
TUMO Academy Drawing Training Lead
Works exhibited:
Jungles, 2016
Digital painting, printed on canvas
The Emergence of the Poet, 2020
Digital painting, printed on canvas
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
“In both pieces I presented, I was trying to blur the line between reality and imagination. Not just as play, but as a way to envision future possibilities. I painted ‘Astronaut in the Jungle’ with a mouse (I usually draw with a digital tablet), and it took over a month. My wrist hurt the entire time. Art demands its little sacrifices. :)”
Sona draws like someone who remembers their dreams too clearly. There’s wonder, yes, but also ache. Her lines hold on to memories you didn’t know you had. A hint of childhood folklore here. A pre-electric-green sky there. And in between, a kind of stillness that gives you a thought.
As Vigen put it: “These works aren’t Armenian in the thematic sense. Their Armenianness lives in atmosphere, in logic, in emotional residue. Subtle, but impossible to miss if you know what to look for.”
Next up: Aram Pachyan, who brings a pen to a knife fight and dares you to find the border between author and protagonist. Spoiler: there isn’t one.
Aram Pachyan
Writer
TUMO Writing Workshop Leader
Work exhibited:
P/F, 2020
Published by Edge Publishing House («Էջ» հրատարակչատուն)
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
“I didn’t want to understand or relive anything. While writing, I tried to erase the boundary between the reality of my life and the reality of the novel. I wanted them to become indistinguishable. So that nothing could separate them again.”
Aram snips the wires behind your expectations. He knows language is both a weapon and a wound, and he’s fluent in both. There’s a silence inside his work that isn’t empty. It’s loaded. And it dares you to sit with it.
He wasn’t at the Berlin reading of his book. Which, in a way, makes perfect sense. The text was there. The author didn’t need to be — the emotion was already in the room.
Speaking of emotional weather: Mariam Muradyan’s up next, and she’s not here to sugarcoat the forecast.
Mariam Energetic Muradyan
TUMO Alum, Installation Artist
TUMO Yerevan Learning Coach
Work exhibited:
There Are Black Clouds Above My Head, 2021
Rope, rubbish bags, balloons
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
“If I say there’s a black cloud above my head, I mean it. No metaphor. That’s how it feels to live here most days.”
Mariam doesn’t wrap emotion in allegory. She names it. Her installations feel like weather reports from the inside out—forecasts made of fear, tenderness, hope, exhaustion. Born from the repetition of hardship, they carry the emotional residue of living through ongoing crisis.
Closing the circle: Artur Sukiasyan brings film into the mix, with stories that hit harder when told in silence.
Artur Sukiasyan
Filmmaker
TUMO Event Coordinator, Filmmaking Workshop Leader
Work exhibited:
Lumen Naturae (The Light of Nature), 2024
Short film
© Ute Langkafel MAIFOTO
“During the 44-day war, I went to Stepanakert to document what was happening. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t film it. Later, I began teaching film at TUMO Stepanakert. That’s where I realized I still had something to say. But in a different language. That’s how “Lumen Naturae” was born.”
Artur’s films are deeply human and deeply haunted. They don’t scream. They observe. They ask questions you can’t answer, then linger on the moment you try. He speaks of storytelling as a responsibility. Not just to truth, but to texture. The sound, the timing, the feel of it. And it shows. Whether he’s documenting post-genocide memories in Istanbul or mentoring teens in Stepanakert, his approach is the same: don’t simplify. Don’t flinch. Don’t look away.
And if there’s an ending, it’s this. “Many of the most compelling voices in this show emerged through TUMO,” Vigen noted. “It’s one of the few institutions in Armenia that treats art not as decoration, but as a real practice. A career. A future.”
“What we achieved wasn’t a fixed vision,” Vigen said. “It was a panorama. Dozens of positions, layered and distinct, each contributing to a larger reality. Not about Armenianness. About the human condition, right now.”
And that’s the allegory.